


the place where we weren't stitched up quite right

by copperiisulfate



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Consensual Violence, M/M, POV Second Person, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 09:11:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8243986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/pseuds/copperiisulfate
Summary: You want to throttle him; you want to draw blood.He’s already made his way past your skin, settled somewhere in between your nerve endings, fraying and fraying, setting fires left and right, burning everything, everything down.





	

You want to throttle him; you want to draw blood.

He’s already made his way past your skin, settled somewhere in between your nerve endings, fraying and fraying, setting fires left and right, burning everything, everything down.

You push him into a wall and he has the gall to grin at you, teeth and all.

 _You’re enjoying this_ , you say incredulous.

 _So are you,_ he practically purrs.

That grin of his will be a pebble in your shoe, a headache you can’t fight off, will keep you up on sleepless nights, a shadow in the corner of your mind you can’t drink off.

 

*

 

You taste salt and metal on your tongue, and it’s a vivid dream: your teeth in his skin.

If you can’t beat him, you won’t join him either, but you’ll be neck to neck, beat to beat, breath to breath. You’ll keep pace, will not (cannot) fall behind.

And you are no less, and no more, no better or worse than him.

You have by now stopped trying to beat and tame the beast in your mind, this part of yourself, have come to realize that you know better.

(This is bullshit; you know nothing. There’s nothing left of your higher brain but fading fuel and fumes, nothing but instinct, basic molecular needs: _Fight or fuck. Kill or die._

Sometimes the lines blur. Sometimes it gets messy. You don’t like messy--you never have.

He doesn’t give a shit about what you like--and you have strangely enough, in spite of every shred of your being, liked that.)

 

*

 

Somehow, it is always life and death. sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.

Sometimes, it is the space in between, the curved edge of his canine, the arc of your fingernails, boiling the two of you down to nothing more than jaws and claws, beaks and talons, animal and animal.

Domain. Kingdom. Phylum. Class. Order. Family. Same genus although you feel like different species.

But only right up until you touch and it’s white hot _electric--_

No-- _no_. You’re the same. You’re _always_ the same. You hate it. You want to rip it to pieces, rip _him_ to pieces, rip _yourself_ to pieces.

Instead--

 _Right there_ , you think, when he breathes into your mouth, pressed flushed against you, hips squared against yours.

You think of black widows and praying mantises, think of death as an act of love (think of love as an act of death).

You claw at his back until he _gasps_ , and it’s for you.

His very breath, you think, stolen by you, in vengeance, an act of retribution.

_You take what’s mine and I will take yours right back._

(Still, it’s no comfort.)

They call you generous but they don’t know you very well. You didn’t make it this far by being generous. You don’t go down without a fight. You just smile through it is all, but you don’t bare your teeth the way he does, not out in the open, out loud; perhaps this is why you save this for him.

And yet, he knows you better than he has any right to and it drives you up the fucking wall. He doesn’t even have to try--the kicker is that he doesn’t even _want to try._

You also know that if you’re in someone’s vantage point then they are usually in yours as well, standing within plain sight.

And you think, _I see you too, Red King._

_I spy your quicksilver courage and your tattered heart._

Sometimes, you wish you didn't though; this way makes it harder to feel the way you so desperately want to.

You hate him except for times like this, and sometimes hate him in spite of this: so grand, so fallible, such a _fucking contradiction of time and space._

You hate him even when you want him (want him even when you hate him).

He turns _you_ into a contradiction and this too you hate because you have always felt solid in your skin, known where you stood--

\--except when he puts his hands on you and you are rearranged, the pressure too high, all the nicely slotted pieces now crashing into each other, all jagged edges, singing nerve endings: a messy portrait of being human.

(You never say his name when you meet him in the night.

You pretend not to know it--pretend not to even know your own.)

 

*

 

His hands don’t bleed against the steel of your sword. Your sword doesn’t crack inside his hands. It feels like these things should happen but infinitely, paradoxically, you cancel each other out.

The next time, you bite at the back of his hand, juncture between thumb and index finger.

(You want to draw blood but you don’t.)

He turns his face into the pillow. If there’s a sound, it’s drowned out by the traffic on the streets below, in another world outside the window, or you don’t catch it.

He splays his fingers around the edge of your face right after, too gentle, too intimate.

And you want to leave; you want to scream.

(You want to bruise him hard and raw. You do nothing, not this time.)

His fingers drift to your neck, graze a pulse point, and only then do you register that it’s quickened.

Suddenly: you want the impossible.

But then, you always have.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> late thing for mikorei-week day 6: conflict; super loopy or otherwise it’d never be finished. title/ambience liberally poached from siken’s _crush_ anthology, as always really, specifically, this bit from _snow and dirty rain_
> 
> The way you slam your body into mine reminds me  
> I'm alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling,  
> and they're only a few steps behind you, finding  
> the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren't  
> stitched up quite right, the place they could almost  
> slip right into through if the skin wasn't trying to  
> keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side  
> of the theater where the curtain keeps rising.


End file.
